Peering into Peer Editing

Goals of the Study Peer editing has been a useful tool in the traditional writing process, especially in recent years. This idea of revising the works of your peers and providing constructive criticism is wildly popular in high school classrooms as well as in entry-level college courses, and it is usually introduced at the early middle school level. The technique is applauded because of its ability to not only benefit the recipient of the edits, but also the editors themselves who learn skills such as assessing and offering justifiable comments (Crossman and Kite 2). It is also believed that peer editing encourages the student to write for a broader audience rather than solely for their teacher, resulting in more direct communication versus stiff, scholarly writing (Phillipson). However, even with its evident popularity, there are some skeptics who believe peer editing has its downsides. Some of these arguments illuminate the fact that most students correct only trivial errors, such as grammatical ones. In one study from the University of Connecticut, more change was made from the initial copy to the final in the area of “writing conventions” versus that of “organization” (Crossman and Kite 5). Critics also acknowledge that it can be hard to find a “happy medium” in the amount of input given. Some editors lack the knowledge, confidence or interest to make a sufficient number of corrections, while others attack people’s papers and sometimes even provide them with erroneous corrections (Phillipson). Because I have used peer editing for most of my academic life, I have come to my own conclusion about its pros and cons and which may outweigh the other. But I was interested to know if my peers’ opinions matched my own. I believe peer editing has limitations and needs alteration in several areas if it is to be a useful tool for improving writing. To learn more about the views of others, I decided to explore how beneficial they found peer editing based on their own experiences with the process. The aim of this study was to provide insight into the peer-editing process as it exists now and ultimately provide information that could improve the process and better students’ writing. This research study addressed two major questions: (1) how beneficial is peer editing to college undergraduates in entry-level writing courses? and (2) can the peer-editing process be improved upon? I chose to survey and interview undergraduate freshmen in their first semester at James Madison University because I felt they would have roughly the same level of exposure to the process and would not have completed any college-level classes that could use methods more advanced than the grade-school level.